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Jean apologizes for Canada’s role in Rwanda

The Governor General tells Rwandans Canada takes responsibility for failing to respond “soon enough,” in the first state visit since 1994 genocide.

Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean pauses after laying a wreath Wednesday at the mass gravesite of 250,000 victims of the 1994 Rwandan genocide, on the grounds of the Gisozi Genocide Memorial Museum. Jean apologized for Canada's role in failing to prevent the violence that swept the country. (TONDA MACCHARLES / TORONTO STAR) | Order this photo

Gov. Gen. Michaelle Jean, right, shakes hands with Rwandan President Paul Kagame as she arrives in Kigali April 21, 2010. Jean later officially apologized for Canada's inactions during the country's 1994 genocide. (Sean Kilpatrick / THE CANADIAN PRESS)

By Tonda MacCharlesOttawa Bureau

Wed., April 21, 2010

KIGALI- Governor-General Michaëlle Jean formally apologized to Rwandans for Canada’s role as part of the international community that failed to act “soon enough” to prevent the 1994 genocide.

Declaring the genocide was made possible by the “indifference and inaction of the international community,” Jean said “Canada acknowledges and takes responsibility as part of the international community for not having responded soon enough to what was happening here.”

“I think we could have made a difference. I think we could have prevented the magnitude of the horror that brought (...) genocide here.”

Rwanda erupted in ethnic violence in April 1994, and more than 800,000 Tutsi minority and moderate Hutus were slain in an organized, murderous rampage of machete and club-wielding mobs.

Jean’s declaration, delivered in the cabinet chamber of the presidential offices in the presence of Rwanda’s president, ministers, and journalists, comes on the occasion of Canada’s first state visit to this country since the 1994 massacres, in the middle of the nation’s month of mourning.

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It follows similar expressions of regret by Belgium’s prime minister and former U.S. President Bill Clinton in recent years.

Asked what more Canada could have done, Rwanda’s Foreign Affairs Minister Louise Mushikiwabo said “the first thing Canada could have done very simply was to listen to Gen. (Romeo) Dallaire,” who led UN peacekeeping forces in Rwanda in 1994 but whose pleas for authorization and reinforcements to stop the killings fell on deaf ears in New York.

She said Canada should now help Rwanda to emerge from the aftermath of the genocide.

She cited foreign aid, which has been frozen at current levels, and Ottawa’s decision to drop Rwanda as a country classified as a “priority.” She pointed to tensions over Ottawa’s denial of visas for many Rwandans to travel to Canada, including Rwandan government members on official business. One of her own officials saw his diplomatic passport seized, and was ordered to leave Canada, she said. Rwanda’s president Paul Kagame raised the same issues in his private meetings with Jean too.

“We don’t understand it and we take it very seriously,” she said. “We hope after today this is resolved.”

Listening closely to Jean was Kagame, who led Tutsi forces to Kigali to seize power from the genocidal leaders and end the killings in July 1994.

Her declaration came on a day when Kagame, who shut down two newspapers last week, faces increasing criticism for stifling dissent with a heavy hand.

Hours after the governor-general’s declaration, news emerged his government has arrested a Rwandan opposition party leader whom it accused of denying the genocide took place, and collaborating with Rwanda Hutu rebels in the neighbouring Democratic Republic of Congo, according to Agence France Presse. Victoire Ingabire was to challenge Kagame at the polls this August.

Kagame did not respond to Jean’s statement, but later his official spokesperson said it was a welcome and “profound” apology.

“Since 1994 we haven’t had anybody at the level of the governor general come to this country and say that Canadians remember…and they are with us as we continue to rebuild,” said Mushikiwabo.

“For Rwandans it always feel good when we hear many years later that yes, something went terribly wrong and we’re part of this, because we keep fighting with the idea that the genocide ‘is a Rwandan thing, it’s been dormant in us for so many years’—No. Genocide is a humanity issue; it cannot be left just to us. So it was a very good statement.”

At the start of her two-day state visit, the governor general first went to the Gisozi Genocide Memorial Museum in Kigali, where she laid a wreath on a mass burial site where the remains of more than 250,000 victims of the genocide are interred.

Silent and solemn, she was guided through the museum which tells a graphic story through film, photos, text and artifacts, including bloodied clothing and the skulls of victims—men, women and children.

Jean paused and nodded at a mural depicting Dallaire. Later, she said she was “deeply moved,” by the entire experience. She was “very pleased” to see the museum’s “tribute” to Dallaire’s unsuccessful efforts, she added.

“General Romeo Dallaire was one of the Canadians who really tried their best to protect people here, to send the right messages to say something is happening here and there’s a population in danger.”

Now a senator, Dallaire was in meetings all day Wednesday, and had not read her declaration, so declined comment, his office said.

Dimitri Soudas, spokesman for Prime Minister Stephen Harper, said simply that Jean’s remarks “referred to two motions unanimously adopted by the House of Commons on Feb. 24. 2004, and Apr. 7, 2008, which regret the indifference and inaction of the international community.”

Dallaire is viewed by many as one who did “what he could,” in the words of one woman survived the slaughter of 65 of her relatives, including her father, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

She does not want to give her name, uneasy with labels and public identification in a newspaper. She now works at the Gisozi museum, where all the guides are genocide survivors, and says it is “where I belong.”

“I give honour to our lost beloved. They didn’t want to die like this. They want us to keep on remembering them so they did not die for nothing.”

But a group of Kigali taxi drivers huddled under a tree during a cloudburst were dismissive of the Canadian apology, and of Dallaire’s efforts.

He demanded what Canada will do to now help Rwandans. “Will Canada now help the orphans and widows, the women who were raped, the survivors of the genocide, who have nowhere to live, who can’t go to school, who have no means to help themselves?”

Another driver demanded to know if Ottawa would now extradite “génocidaires” who led or carried out the massacres and later fled to Canada, so they can be brought to justice. “A lot of them” are in Canada, insisted the man who also didn’t want to give his name.

As for Dallaire, the drivers said it is little wonder he is “traumatized” given what he saw and his powerlessness.

“If it wasn’t possible to intervene, he should have resigned and left the country,” said Sagahutu.

“He can apologize forever. He should have done something. He was a general who saw people die and he did nothing,” said Jean-Marie Ndatimana, 39.

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